


The Opposite Of War

by Enneara



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Episode: s08e03 The Long Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-16 18:45:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18697153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enneara/pseuds/Enneara
Summary: Jaime blinked at her. He drew back a little, only a little, and looked at her as if she was the dawn at the end of a long night, only he’d been fighting with his back to the fire for so long he thought he might be imagining her. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m new to this fandom, so apologies if the following is full of clichés, but I just had to write something for these two while there’s still a remote chance of them making it out alive. Title quote is from Saga by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples.

‘The opposite of war is fucking.’ - D. Oswald Heist

 

\----

After the dawn, after the battle, after hours of carrying corpses out from the halls of Winterfell, of digging mass graves and directing the digging of others, of watching people find their loved ones alive and weep with joy or find them in a pile of bodies and scream with sorrow;

after dismissing Pod to eat and rest, after working another hour under the pale winter sun, after passing through tiredness and beyond, into a strange, white world where her limbs were controlled by something outside her and she simply watched them moving;

after she looked up and blinked and saw that the bodies were covered enough to keep the wolves away, that she was the only person still working, that everyone had long since gone to find a place to sleep:

Brienne turned back into the courtyard of Winterfell, wondering what _after_ could possibly mean. What did one do, after?

A bath. She wanted a bath, more than she wanted food, much more than she wanted sleep. Every time her eyes closed, she saw visions of the snapping, clawing dead, too insubstantial to fight, too vivid to ignore. She let the force controlling her feet direct them toward the steams. She passed halls full of people: most sleeping, some urgently talking, a few fucking desperately and quietly in corners. Brienne worried she’d find more of them in the steams, but when she walked in, the baths were all empty save one.

She knew a moment of deep anger. All she wanted was a place to soak and get clean and cry where no one could see her. What right did this person have to be awake when almost no one else was? Then she recognized the back of the head and the shoulders as Jaime’s, and a different feeling filled her, one she couldn’t quite name.

He turned at the sound of her feet. ‘Ser Brienne,’ he said, and inclined his head.

 _I’m not in the mood to be mocked_ , she almost said, before she remembered. Not mockery: truth, by his hand. His sword on her shoulders, his eyes on hers as he raised her up. An echo of joy, so muted by horror that she could barely believe she had ever felt it.

‘Ser Jaime,’ she said uncertainly. For a moment she hovered in place. Then she strode to the bath where he was.

He didn’t watch her as she disrobed. He could have spared his courtesy: Brienne didn’t care. Most of it was nothing he hadn’t seen before, and besides, what meaning was there in modesty when she had seen — couldn’t stop seeing — a woman with her ribcage open to the heart, her bone fingers scrabbling for Jaime’s throat?

She climbed into the bath, the hot water awakening and soothing her aches. She ducked her head, partly to avoid Jaime’s eyes but mostly to wash the blood out of her hair. When she closed her eyes under the water she could see them: the man with half his face gone, one bright blue eye hanging in vacancy; the child that had screamed as she thrust Oathkeeper through its neck, teeth snapping inches from her face. She shuddered and surfaced, opening her eyes.

Jaime was watching her. ‘I can still see them,’ he said.

For the first time, she met his eyes. There was a horror there that no water could wash away. ‘So can I,’ she said calmly. ‘Whenever I close my eyes. And sometimes when I don’t.’

He nodded, then kept nodding, as if the truth of what she’d said overwhelmed him. When he took in a shuddering breath, Brienne thought, _no_ , and then when he started shaking, she thought, _please no_ , and then when he began to sob, she sighed and crossed the bath, raising a wave that slapped onto the floor, and took him in her arms.

He made a sound, of shame or gratitude, and lowered his head onto her shoulder. She held him, a little awkwardly, half sitting by his side and half wrapped around him, trusting the strength of her body to contain him as he fell apart. He shook for a long time, with sobs that were all the more terrifying because they were silent: as if some curse were draining him and the witch had taken his voice first. When Brienne’s own tears came, she let them stand in her eyes but would not let them fall. One of them had to be strong. ‘We’re alive,’ she said fiercely into his ear, rocking him in her arms. ‘We’re alive.’

When it was over, they were quiet and still, wrapped naked around each other in the bath as if they did this all the time. Brienne’s mind turned on the thought of baths, as Jaime’s breathing grew slow and even and she felt his heart beat near hers like an all’s-well at midnight. It was in the bath in Harrenhal where she had first begun to see him clearly. Now she knew him better, and in this altered state beyond tiredness his clarity gleamed to her, sang like glass stroked with a finger.

A cramp attacked Brienne’s leg, and she moved it, straightening it across Jaime’s lap where she brushed against—

He coughed and moved away, his face flushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Waves of hot and cold ran over Brienne, what had been familiar to her as her own flesh suddenly strange. Everything about Jaime at that moment hit her like a ringing blow: not so much the evidence of his desire as the fact that he was _blushing_. That he cared enough about what she thought of him, and what she thought of what he thought of her, to be worried that his desire might bring her dishonor. It was all so absurd and so precious, so much an expression of what she had come to feel for him, that all of it coalesced together and moved down to form a scalding knot low in her belly that told her: _yes_.

‘Don’t be,’ she said. Or, someone said it and Brienne heard the person’s voice and it was herself. And someone moved her hand to Jaime’s back, to pull him closer.

Jaime blinked at her. He drew back a little, only a little, and looked at her as if she was the dawn at the end of a long night, only he’d been fighting with his back to the fire for so long he thought he might be imagining her. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

He looked so uncertain. Brienne stared, her heart ringing like a sword under a hammer. Asking brought the risk of rejection, of humiliation, of being made to feel not enough: all the things she’d told herself she didn’t care about. And that had become, mostly, true: but only because the person doing them had never been Jaime.

‘I’m sure,’ she said easily, then swallowed. ‘What about you?’

Jaime laughed. ‘You’re asking me?’

The laugh moved through her like shattered glass, bringing back every snide remark, every time a man had asked for her hand in jest. She drew back, her voice cold. ‘Yes, I’m asking you. Why are you laughing?’

Jaime looked away, his face tormented. ‘I’m sorry. I suppose I’m not used to being asked. Or asking, for that matter.’

And there she was: the shadow of Cersei, stretching between them all the way from King’s Landing. Brienne didn’t want to think about her and Jaime together, about how the two of them had turned each other into monsters. With an anger she knew wasn’t fair, she snapped, ‘I don’t care if you’re used to it. I’m asking because I want you to be truthful. I don’t want your — your pity, or your misplaced —’

‘Brienne,’ he said. He was looking at her with tender frustration.

‘What?’

If he had gone to kiss her mouth, she might very possibly have hit him. But instead, he dipped his head and kissed her neck, right over the deep bruise where her armor — his armor — had dug into her skin. One of the dead had jumped down onto her from the battlements. The pain, the flashing sight of the thing’s rotting belly, came back for an instant, then receded, beaten back by the unfamiliar sensation of Jaime’s mouth, hot and ardent on her tender flesh. It felt good. The good feeling of it sank down through the water and settled between her legs, and this was rapidly turning from something she had felt in control of to something terrifying. Brienne listened to her own breath coming faster, felt Jaime’s hand ghost down her arm. Panic surged in her. She had no idea what she was doing. All her competence stripped from her in an instant, leaving her as ignorant and clumsy as a novice swinging a wooden sword.

Jaime lifted his head, looked at her with a question in his eyes. ‘Is this — are you —’

His hesitation, his vulnerability, saved her. This was sex, after all. A fairly simple matter of panting and groaning, as far as she could tell, something she had always looked at with sideways scorn. How difficult could it be? She was strong, and fast, and a quick learner. She was a knight, and she had survived the Long Night, and she could do anything.

Brienne decided to approach this like she had approached learning to duel: to trust her instincts, to take instruction when necessary, and most importantly, to win.

She ran her hands over Jaime’s shoulders, enjoying the tense, lean feeling of him under her hands. She straddled him, because that felt good, and Jaime obviously agreed, because he made a sound that was almost a growl, running his hand down her side and gripping her thigh. She pressed her forehead against his, both of them breathing hard, and then they were kissing, mouths open and tongues sliding together, and this was _easy_ , why had no one told her it would be so easy? Jaime’s hand slid round to the inside of her thigh, then up between her legs, touching her where she had only touched herself. She froze for a moment at the strangeness of it. Then it became clear he knew what he was doing. She said something incoherent into his mouth. He smiled, and she panted against his cheek and rutted on his hand until her pleasure surged and spilled over and she gasped, collapsing in inelegant ecstasy across his shoulder.

When she came back to herself, Jaime was grinning at her with a quite obscene smugness.

‘You don’t have to look so pleased with yourself,’ she grunted.

‘I don’t have to,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to.’

‘You just wait.’ She reached down through the water, not letting him see any hesitation as she took him in her hand. ‘Tell me,’ she said, not shy but impatient, and he did, as she listened, touching him, watching his face for clues. ‘Yes,’ he said, and ‘like that,’ and ‘harder’, and finally, ‘ _Brienne_ ,’ in a strangled voice, pushing her hand away.

She drew back, panic rising again. ‘Did I do something wrong?’

‘No, no. Just — you can’t keep going like that if you want me to last long enough to fuck you.’ He looked at her with new seriousness. ‘Do you?’

She nodded, breathless, half-afraid and half-something else. She’d gone this far, after all. And her blood was due in a few days, so she knew the chance of a child was small, and even having that thought was absurd: in what universe would she ever be having that thought while she sat straddled across Jaime Lannister? She looked down at him, at his tired beloved face, at the terrifying warmth in his eyes. ‘Should I — do I need to move?’ she said, as if she was asking him for drill instructions.

‘No,’ he said, with no trace of mockery, only calm reassurance. ‘You’re perfect where you are.’

‘Perfect,’ she said, with a bitter laugh.

‘Brienne,’ he said again, that mix of remonstrance and passion. As if he were giving her name a meaning, _I-need-you_ and _you-are-beautiful_ and _yes_ and _yes_ and _yes_.

Brienne knew, as he guided her onto him, a moment of self-consciousness, as if she suddenly became aware of someone standing beside the bath: a long-ago version of herself, watching with contempt as she let Jaime Lannister fuck her. The thought of that word brought back the panic, the fear of diminishment. Brienne knew what fucking was. Fucking was something men talked about, sometimes when they thought she wasn’t listening and sometimes when they were absolutely sure she was. Fucking was something that happened to women, not something they did. It was a reduction, turning her from a person to a thing to be possessed. Was that what she was doing? Giving herself to Jaime, ensuring he would never again see her as a knight and his equal, only as some woman he had fucked?

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, his hand gentle on her cheek.

Brienne dragged her thoughts out of the chain that bound them. What did it matter what people said, when it was so different from the reality of what she was feeling: Jaime, around her and within her, the hot slick place where the two of them joined, the close heat of his gaze. And so she kept the word away, didn’t let it touch what they were doing together. Her old self wouldn’t have understood. But her old self hadn’t had all the facts. She hadn’t had Jaime’s quiet truth and the long, slow burn of his respect. She hadn’t had his hand and his sword and his back all through the Long Night, and the sure and proven knowledge that he would die for her, as simply and as unquestionably as she would die for him.

‘Yes,’ she said, and she began to move. It was better than she had thought, and she almost didn’t want it to be because it took away from the superiority she’d always tried to feel at being above all this, but the sheer scalding _goodness_ of him sliding in and out of her drove every other thought out of her head. She cried out, and a wave from her driving movements hit the edge of the bath and splashed noisily onto the floor.

‘We’re going to start a flood if we’re not careful,’ Jaime said, laughing, and she laughed too, and they were together in the absurdity and beauty of it all, and Brienne had never been so happy, except for the time a day earlier when he had given her the only thing she had ever really wanted in her life.

They climbed, careful, still joined, up onto the edge of the bath. She started to move again, slow at first then faster, harder, riding him with the same fierceness with which she had defended him, saving them both from the memory of the night, bringing them out into a glorious, blinding day. All the while she kept her eyes on Jaime’s face, the wonder breaking through as if this was new to him as it was to her, as if they were the first people in the world to discover this way of moving each other. As he gasped and gripped her tighter and thrust up into her, his eyes squeezing shut, Brienne forgot the hours of pain, the night that had never seemed to end, and she understood: what they were doing was the opposite of death, as fervent and necessary as their long fight had been. Jaime fell on her shoulder, muttering soft blasphemies in her ear, and Brienne was laughing, she couldn’t stop laughing, and he was laughing too, the shakes of their laughter making each other quake. He was still inside her, and Brienne didn’t want to change that, but her leg was cramping again.

She lifted herself off him and slid bonelessly back into the bath to wash herself. She climbed out, aware of his eyes on her, and unfolded one of the long tunics kept on warm stones by some considerate person who had realized a lot of people were going to need something to sleep in that wasn’t drenched in the blood of the dead.

Jaime was still on the side of the bath, watching her with a dazed satisfaction she wanted to memorize. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To bed,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘Where do you usually sleep?’

He shrugged. ‘Any patch of floor I can find that’s out of spitting distance of Stark bannermen.’

Brienne shook her head. She held out her hand. ‘Come with me.’

Dried and dressed, he followed her through the winding halls of the castle, up a tower and into a small but comfortable room, with a sturdy bed piled with furs. As she closed the door behind them, Jaime looked at her incredulously. ’You get a whole _room_?’

Brienne smiled, falling back onto the bed. ‘Some of us are still in Lady Stark’s favor.’

He approached her, stood over her with intent. ‘Aren’t you worried her favor may lapse when she finds out who you’ve taken into your bed?’

She looked up at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Who said you get to sleep in the bed?’

She had aimed for a joke, but he backed away with a crestfallen look. ‘If you want me to leave, I —’

‘Jaime. Of course I don’t want you to leave.’ She sat up and grabbed for the edge of his tunic, pulling him closer. She shook her head, searching for words. ‘Other women might — play games. Say one thing and ask you to guess another.’ Cersei’s shadow again, whispering across the room in the wind from the curtain. Brienne steeled herself. ‘But I know my own mind, and I know my own heart. If I didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be here.’

He smiled a little at that. ‘Well, that’s certainly true. You would most likely have thrown me out of the window by now.’

‘Exactly. Now. Are you coming to bed, or do I have to carry you?’

He gave her a serious look. Then, he tilted his head and quirked his mouth, as if to say, _well_ …

She stood up, lifted him in her arms, and dropped him unceremoniously onto the bed. He rolled, laughing, and she jumped in after him, pulling him close.

He turned to face her, eyes already half-shut. ‘What are you smiling about?’

‘I’ve found something else I can beat you at.’

‘Brienne,’ he said sleepily, scornfully, ‘you don’t win at sex.’

‘Maybe _you_ don’t.’

She let the sound of his laugh ring through her, and when her eyes closed and the dead came for her, she knew how to fight them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this little followup scene before 8x04 came out, and decided to post it afterwards in either celebration or commiseration, whatever might happen. So here it is, in…both, I guess? I still have hope. Thanks so much to everyone who left kudos and comments on this fic - it means a lot.

Later in the day that was their night, he woke and reached for her. At the same time, she reached for him, and they rolled across the bed, grappling like fighters, laughing softly as they wrestled each other out of their tunics. Naked, they tangled together, all hands and mouths and desperate, groping need, until she was under him and he was sliding against the wet heat of her, teasing himself and her with his nearness. He had woken with the sole thought of getting back inside her as swiftly as possible, but now, with her pinned warm underneath him, he was reconsidering. There was nothing wrong with a little delayed gratification.

Brienne didn’t seem to agree. She thrust her hips towards him, making frustrated little sounds of want. ‘Jaime,’ she protested in a low voice.

Gods, the way she was _moving_ , panting and writhing like his cock was a victory almost in her grasp. The naked need in her eyes stroked the shattered remains of his ego, put him in a teasing mood. He leaned close to her, mouth inches from her own. ‘Say please,’ he said.

That angered her, as he had hoped. She growled in fury and bucked against him, bringing up her knee and throwing her weight on his side. Before Jaime understood what had happened, he was on his back and she was triumphantly impaling herself on him, groaning in satisfaction as she drove him deep inside her. He had never felt so thoroughly possessed in his life. He lay in a sex-drunk daze, staring up at her scarred neck and bruised shoulders, her powerful torso, her bright furious eyes. He would have surrendered willingly, let her ride him until she was satisfied, if he hadn’t wanted to push her, to give her the fight she desired.

‘Not so fast,’ he said, and slid out from underneath her, dodging her grab and flipping her onto her belly until she lay pinned beneath him, writhing as he pulled her up onto her hands and knees. ‘Your education is nowhere near complete.’

‘ _Jaime_ —’ she protested, then his name dissolved into a gasp as he took her from behind. He buried himself in her, biting the back of her neck, then pulled out slowly, making her moan and back into him in a way that turned his thoughts to molten gold.

‘How — how’s that?’ he asked, hearing his own voice go hoarse with wanting.

’Harder,’ she said, not needy but stern, like a knight scolding an errant squire.

Gods help him, he almost came. ‘Yes ser,’ he said with feeling, and thrust into her, so hard that the thick wooden headboard she braced against thumped with a pounding rhythm into the wall. Knowing his luck, Sansa Stark was on the other side of that wall, judging his performance by the volume of her sworn knight’s screams. Jaime felt Brienne clench around him, heard her moan in pleasure. Too fast, too soon, he spilled inside her, his hand on her breast, his mouth in her hair as he drew in shuddering breath after breath.

‘ _Gods_ ,’ said Brienne with feeling. ‘I think I finally see what all the fuss was about.’ She collapsed onto her side, and Jaime fell with her, his arm around her, wanting her again already, his frail body no match for his absurd, bottomless desire.

‘So,’ he asked, the short strands of her hair tickling his nose as he took her earlobe in his teeth. ‘Did I win that time?’

Brienne was silent for so long he thought she had fallen asleep. Finally, she said, ‘We’ll call that one a draw.’


End file.
